Which way to list products

The cart that is being used on our site gives the option to list products in several ways. One way is the product name in the link with a pic, just the anchor text links or anchor text links with a description. Which is better in terms of SEO and ranking?

Anchor text is better for SEO. But remember, this is an ecommerce site. You have to think about your users' experience. If it sucks they won't buy from you and then it won't matter how much traffic you get from the search engines. Use whichever makes the user experience better. (Although ideally you will have both as that is the best of both worlds).

In terms of SEO anchor text links with a description would be your best bet. Anchor text is more valuable than link from image, and description will add more content to the page. Visitors will like to see product description as well, even a short one.

I agree. That is how I was looking at it. They liked the pictures (which could be a pic of the type of product, logo's, etc) as people may know brand. I thought from an SEO perspective, the link to the product with the the kw in the anchor and a description of the product would allow me to give more information.

As for making it for the users, I completely understand. I presume I would have to experiment with links with pics and then links with the description to determine which yields better conversion?

From my experience a brief description always works best. Sometimes we use a couple bullet points of the key features. This also helps for SEO if you write your own descriptions. You can't go wrong with content.

I figured (after the fact of course) that more content on the page would be helpful. I will experiment with it. Only problem is its been taking forever to get the bots back to the site to pick up my updates. Thanks for the insight folks!